Mainly Blank City shows a succession of engaging, intelligent, middle-aged people showing some very bad home movies that they once hoped were something more.

A minor but sometimes touching documentary.

A letdown despite its intriguing premise.

Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."

The film itself seems to be going nowhere slowly, but in this case, that's mostly a good thing. It allows observant writer-director Matt McCormick to take his time on the small moments and make us care more about his characters.

In a deceptively low-key manner, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen has beautifully crafted one of the most provocative movies of the year.

Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.

A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

This dark and seedy follow-up to 2009's blockbuster comedy has a quite a retro message - suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a "demon" within, that requires constant taming.

L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Sometimes corny, often funny and just as often touching, their act has been wowing Kiwis for decades.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

An honest, fair and quite voyeuristic look into avatars and the real-life humans who control them in Second Life.

A must-see movie that could have used a sharper edge.

The story is painfully simplistic, and it becomes quickly apparent that the narrative is a crude cement to hold together the carnage.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

The movie's mixture of romance and noir, its air of menace and a certain occasional playfulness suggest the filmmakers have been thinking about Polanski and Hitchcock.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Art history lessons don't get much better: Cave of Forgotten Dreams presents the world's oldest paintings captured by one of film's great visionaries.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

Bottaro finds ways to dramatize chess, and the environments are fascinating throughout.

Dragons may have seemed less out of place three decades ago, but it would have been a bad movie then as well. It's filled with clumsy transitions and erratic performances, and tied together by an awkward framing device.

In style and structure, it mimics an old-style studio effort, a culture-clashing comedy of manners that's tinged with melodrama and filmed in a smart progression of medium shots.

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

This horror-slasher-thriller-tragi-romance is certainly going to leave some squeamish, but there's no denying that this is high-quality filmmaking.

It not only evocatively captures the Russian spirit and the yearnings of a generation, but it also masterfully chronicles the historic collapse of the Soviet Union and its complex aftermath.

Bursts with action, ideas and interesting characters.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

The need for a sequel was zero - proved by the fact that the characters end the movie pretty much exactly where they started it.

It's a movie for audiences who think exuberance in movies is more important than sense or logic and who can laugh at a movie and like it at the same time.

The well-crafted 13 Assassins, a remake of a 1960s samurai film, is one of his best; it shows that Takashi could be a great filmmaker if he'd only slow down.

Like its protagonist, Ceremony is as smart as it is exasperating.

The result is a movie that one watches with the sense of pushing it up a hill.

His affable, regular-guy shtick works well here, and he scatters the movie with such gleeful ads for his sponsors' products that, if his documentary work ever dries up, his next career choice is obvious.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

Features some of Clive Owen's best work and a startling movie debut by the 15-year-old Liana Liberato.

In Water for Elephants, Waltz plays a circus owner and ringleader during the Great Depression, and when he's onscreen, every eye is on him, no matter who is talking.

A road trip into the heart of that bumpiest of territories, the adolescent id.

The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie. Gorgeous scenery meets oddball characters and mild ethnic stereotyping.

The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.

The most amazing act in the Gran Circo Mexico doesn't take place in the ring - it's the grind between performances.

Henry's Crime has three charismatic actors - Reeves, Vera Farmiga and James Caan - in search of a decent script, and what they find, instead, are a handful of good scenes and lots of room to build their respective characters.

A strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern.

It's precisely that fear that Redford sets out to explore. The Conspirator is all about the un-American things Americans can do when feeling collectively threatened.

A heartrending film, Lee's Poetry is indeed a work of art.

The script is weak, but everyone on the technical side of "Soul Surfer" is a pro. The scenes in the water flow together nicely, and the action is always coherent. Robb's scenes without an arm look seamless throughout the movie.

The film about violence and retribution is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.

Cunningham's work is about seeing and teaching us how to see, and that should be plenty for us.

The visuals are excellent, featuring a refreshingly small dose of forced cuteness, and plenty of the animals' natural movements.

The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination - its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best.

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

A compelling mess.

Rubber has its share of jollies, at least when it isn't boring us to death with the fourth-wall-busting monkey business. Although I appreciate Dupieux's efforts at satire, the audience-interaction subplot goes nowhere fast.

Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.

Wilson is basically playing an even more feckless version of his "Office" character, Dwight, another intense and self-deluded doofus. It's a character that works better in smaller doses.

It's funny, broad and never stops moving. It's made to please, and succeeds.

The movie is hampered throughout by little inconsistencies.

The most notable thing about Hop is its technical perfection. It puts live action and animation into the same frame so seamlessly that the filmmakers might easily not get credit for it.

Director Duncan Jones achieves a strange and winning amalgam, a gripping action film that also works as poetry.

The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

What makes this film special and memorable is the character of Danny Green, who is not the usual neighborhood hoodlum you see in movies.

Koolhoven is able to strip away both visually and mentally our idealized cinematic notions of how the resistance fighters lived. It's a lonely existence. It's stark and it's scary. And it makes for a compelling movie.

Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director, he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, Sucker Punch - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time.

There are odd comic moments, but this is a bleak, nighttime, nightmare world, where the couple seem to have about the same chance at a happy outcome as the accident victims.

Rodrick Rules has a brighter comic edge than its predecessor - and a bit more spunk.

This latest adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel is careful, respectful and even enjoyable, and yet dry, singularly humorless and played without the lavishness of spirit that makes sense of Gothic melodrama.

Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.

The songs and a couple of strong performances are only good enough to make the film watchable, not exceptional.

It serves up a broad humanistic lesson with absurdism and black comedy more sad than barbed.

Right now, his (Dolan) work is fun to watch. Before long, it may very well be mandatory for anyone who values great filmmaking.

Not only is a good look at a man who carved a small but important niche into the folk world but a good record of the turbulent 1960s and what motivated its protesters.

The story gets away from itself as it barrels forward. The tiny bit of sense it makes at the beginning is quickly sacrificed in a conclusion so facile, illogical and cheap that it could use a dose of NZT itself.

A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.

This is a well-made, well-plotted and sensitive movie.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

It's an observant and heartfelt film, with turns of dialogue that show that writer-director Josh Radnor really can write.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

Carbon Nation serves us a full portion of scary statistics, but overall tries to accentuate the positive.

The film is never dull. And director Yony Leyser has come up with an ending that will take your breath away. Burroughs would probably be proud.

The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds.

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

Does an admirable job of telling the stories of the obsessive Savitsky and other important Soviet artists, such as Alexander Volkov, Aleksei Rybnikov and Mikhail Kurzin.

I liked this movie, maybe more than I should have, and would be happy to see anything this director wants to do next.

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

This is a beautiful film, full of gray-and white-haired men who grow in stature before our eyes.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

For some, this sort of thinking is a much-needed revolution in human consciousness. For others, it's little more than New Age platitudes and questionable science.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.

It's all very melodramatic, but the Jouberts accompany this story with incredible visuals, with an exceptional level of access. Considering how close they get to the animals, it's a wonder none of the filmmakers got mauled.

If you can weather some slow patches (and there are plenty), this boldly original, oddly affecting meditation on the afterlife will reward you with moments of profundity that will linger in your consciousness (or subconsciousness) for a lifetime (or lifetimes).